The late Venerable Carlo Acutis, now being considered for sainthood, went around the world to document 136 miracles of the Host approved by the Church. This teenager put up an e-museum in the Internet for the world to see in 17 languages, including Filipino, Russian, Arabic, Chinese. This teenager put up an exhibit that travelled to thousands of parishes.

Carlo said the Eucharist was the “highway to heaven”. The closest intimacy with Jesus we can have on Earth is through the Eucharist. Carlo died at the age of 15 of leukaemia. Let us look at one miracle in the museum involving Pope Francis.

Buenos Aires, August 18, 1996. A woman came up to Fr. Alejandro Pezet after Holy Mass, and pointed to a discarded Host on a candleholder. He put it in a container with water and placed it inside the tabernacle.

On August 26, a few days later, he saw that the Host had turned blood red. He informed Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, who immediately had it photographed. On September 6, the photographs revealed that the Host “had become a fragment of bloodied flesh and had grown significantly in size”. For years, the Host was kept secretly in the tabernacle. On October 5, 1999, 33 years later, Archbishop Bergoglio, seeing that the Host did not decompose, sent it for scientific analysis to New York City. (Pope Francis was ordained a priest in 1966, became an archbishop in 1998, Cardinal in 2002, and Pope in 2013.)

The request purposely did not give any background about the Host to Dr. Frederic Zugiba, a well-known cardiologist and forensic pathologist in New York, who did the examination. His findings revealed that it was “real flesh and blood and containing human DNA”. He testified that the material was a fragment of a human heart muscle.

He reported that the examined material was inflamed flesh containing a lot of white blood cells, indicating that the heart was alive at the time the sample was taken. Dr. Zugiba added that white blood cells would die in a matter of minutes if the heart was no longer functioning. The white blood cells had penetrated the tissue, indicating that the heart had been under severe stress, reminding us of the trauma of our Lord on the cross.

When informed that it was a Host, Dr. Zugiba was shocked and said, “How and why a consecrated Host would change its character and become living human flesh and blood will remain an inexplicable mystery to science.”

Forensics on a similar miracle in Tixtla, Mexico in October 2006 revealed the blood type was AB, the same as that found in the Shroud of Turin.

The Eucharist is a core element of our faith. It links us one-on-one with our Saviour who died for our sins. It is the sine qua non of our faith, ‘that without which there is nothing’. Only through Him can we weather severe storm raging inside us.